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When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.

It’s the same in Israel. For those who have not been following developments there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure due to an ongoing investigation for corruption. One of the truly great things about Israel is that while they have a lot of corrupt politicians, just like everywhere else, they actually investigate, indict, prosecute, convict and send them to jail. The betting is that Netanyahu will soon be in prison, so he has been responding in the time-honored fashion by threatening his neighbors and hinting at the possibility of increased military action and even war. If there is a war going on, he believes, probably correctly, that no one will want to remove him.

In an amicable recent meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu stressed that there are some red lines that Israel will not allow to be crossed, while also suggesting that some of them have already been violated, most notably through the alleged construction of an Iranian military base inside Syria. Netanyahu provided Putin with “top secret intelligence” to make his point and told the Russian premier that “Iran is making an accelerated effort to entrench itself militarily in Syria. This poses a danger to Israel, the Middle East and in my opinion the world itself.”

Netanyahu characteristically depicted himself as restrained in his responses, telling Putin that Israel had taken only limited action in Syria against Hezbollah supply lines, but that was a lie as Israel has also hit Syrian army positions. Netanyahu described an Iran that is largely a fantasy creation of his own Foreign Ministry, “We don’t for a second forget that Iran continues to threaten Israel’s destruction on a daily basis. It arms terrorist organizations and initiates terror itself. It is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with the intention to equip them with nuclear warheads.” He went on to claim that his strategic objective was to prevent the development of an Iranian controlled land bridge, described as “territorial continuity,” that would extend through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.

Craig Roberts (yes, there are two of us) is a former US Marine and a 27-year veteran of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, police force. He is a capable and committed person. Since 1989 he has written 13 books. His latest, just published, Medusa File II, consists essentially of his volumnious files of the investigation of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995, known as “the Oklahoma City Bombing.” https://www.amazon.com/Medusa-File-II-Politics-Oklahoma/dp/1547027843/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503780098&sr=1-2&keywords=Craig+Roberts

The FBI, appreciative of Roberts’ capabilities, requested his service in the investigation. As officially part of the investigation, he took the investigation seriously. The investigation proceeded rapidly, developing many leads. Numerous witnesses saw Timothy McVeigh with many dark complexioned men prior to and just after the bombing. Leads were also developed to militias in Elohim City, to the German, Strassmeir, and others.

Before any of these leads could be developed, the investigation was taken over by President Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno. Once Washington took over, the investigation stopped. In its place was Washington’s theory that it was Tim McVeigh’s lonely protest. The volumnious evidence of McVeigh’s accomplices or controllers, as might have been the case, was in the way of the official story that imposed itself on the investigation. Many people resisted the coverup that descended on the case, including local journalists who eventually lost their jobs or moved on.

Roberts stuck it out to the end. So did black Oklahoma City Police sgt. Terrance Yeakey. For resisting the official story Yeakey paid with his life. Roberts provides the reasons he believes Yeakey had definitive evidence that the official story was a coverup. The OCPD was called off once the official story was in place, but Yeakey wouldn’t quit and became a problem. The official OCPD report says it was suicide, but Roberts recognizes homicide when he sees it. There was no autopsy and the police refused to release the police report to Yeakey’s family. Being black, they had little recourse. Remaining skeptics were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” and that was the end of the case.

One of the striking details that Roberts provides is that in the immediate aftermath of the bombing with rescue workers removing dead and wounded from the rubble, numerous federal agents appeared, ordered the rescue workers out of the building on the grounds that there were still unexploded bombs in the building. Then with the trapped still under the rubble, all rescue efforts halted until the federal agents had removed file cabinets from the building. Roberts speculates that the cabinets contained the files of the Mena drug running operation that many believe involved Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, and that President Clinton and Janet Reno didn’t want these files to see the light of day.

For an official explanation of the case that relies solely on McVeigh’s “truck bomb,” the federal agents’ statement that unexploded bombs remained in the building is a conundrum. If there were unexploded bombs remaining in the building, how could it be that McVeigh was the lone wolf perpetrator? It reminded me of General Benton Partin, a US Air Force explosive expert, who produced a detailed report proving that the Murrah building blew up from the inside out, not from the outside in. Of course, by the time Gen. Partin got his study completed, the fix was in, and there was to be no challenge to, or reconsidering of, the official cover story.

Roberts doesn’t know who did the bombing or why. All he knows is that leads were not followed and the case was solved by Washington and not by an investigation.

Just like the assassination of JFK.
Just like the assassination of RFK.
Just like the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Just like 9/11.
Just like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.”
Just like “Iranian nukes.”
Just like the “Gulf of Tonkin.”
Just like Gaddafi and Libya.
Just like Assad’s “use of chemical weapons.”
Just like . . .

During a recent interview at my local unemployment office, the man charged with my case looked at my résumé and expressed his admiration of American journalism. “You people just report the facts; here in France it’s nothing but opinion,” he said.

I told him that while I agreed with the sentiment, his viewpoint was unfortunately out of date. American newspapers today prefer the evidently more exciting role of opinion monger and ideological prosecutor.

I base my view largely on reading the New York Times, for whom I worked for 18 years as a copyeditor, first on the International Herald Tribune and then on the International New York Times. The company treated me well and paid me well, and it did much excellent reporting that inspired my respect, but it also taught me some probably unintended lessons.

Reading the paper, I gathered that its editors and writers had little love for the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee. I drew this conclusion from the implicitly approving way in which they dealt with the persecution by European governments, particularly the French, of people, almost always on the right, who violate the many legal restrictions on public speech. Fines and prison sentences, usually suspended, are the punishment prescribed by law for saying the unacceptable, and I can recall only one protest in the paper during my 18 years there. (Oh, sorry, two: I forgot its defense of Bob Dylan.)

I also learned that its writers and editors judged that white people generally were fair game in a way that other categories were not. I drew this conclusion from the many articles which accused, blamed or pointed an invidious finger at white people and which had no equivalent with regard to other peoples. Nicholas Kristof’s six-part series on “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” for instance, has had no counterpart for any other distinguishable ethnic or racial group. The same might be said for the opinion pieces by Charles M. Blow, Michael Eric Dyson, George Yancy and Roxane Gay.

And of course, the Times, among the most ardent exponents of virtually unlimited immigration into the United States and Europe, rarely could find any motivations but fear and racism in many people’s reluctance to admit thousands or millions of non-European strangers into their countries. Its lack of sympathy with the ordinary people of these countries was evident.

The Times is hardly alone in its biases. They permeate the vast majority of America’s leading newspapers and magazines (and, perhaps, television, but fortunately I don’t see that from here). Even if you have never particularly thought of yourself as white, you will learn to as you read the papers. You will become accustomed to being on the defensive, and you will observe that any journalist who attempts to do something similar to blacks or Jews or other distinct categories of human being is very likely to be branded a racist or antisemite. Those who fail to conform are cast out into the wilderness of the blogosphere.

The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.

In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan.

Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes.

US Marines and Gunnary Sergeant Nate Cosby (R), Staff Sergeant Josh Lacey (2nd R) and Navy Hospitalman 2 Daniel Holmberg (L) from Border Adviser Team (BAT) and Explosive Ordance Disposal (EOD) 1st and 2nd Marine Division (Forward) walk through opium poppy field at Maranjan village in Helmand province on April 25, 2011 as they take patrol with their team and Afghanistan National Police.

The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.

Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in “counternarcotics programs”. Operation Enduring Freedom — along with the “liberation” of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?

The fall of 2017 is set to become a “before-and-after” moment in the ongoing efforts of AE911Truth to educate the world and bring about a new World Trade Center investigation.

That’s because, over the course of the next two months, Dr. Leroy Hulsey will be releasing the findings of his two-year computer modeling study on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. At the same time, we will use his report as a vehicle both to intensify our pressure on Congress to open a new investigation and to finally hold NIST accountable for its fraudulent account of the WTC destruction.
Here’s The Plan
On September 6, 2017, at 8:00 PM Eastern, Dr. Hulsey will present from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Schaibel Auditorium on the findings and conclusions detailed in his team’s September 2017 Progress Report, which will be issued the same day. The presentation will be livestreamed so that viewers across the country and around the world can watch.

Though originally scheduled for release in August, a draft report of the study is now on course to be issued in mid-October. A six-week public comment period will follow the release of the draft report, allowing for input from the public and the engineering community. The final report, which will incorporate constructive comments and will be vetted by peer reviewers, will then be published in early 2018.

In the United States “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.

The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.

For example, the official explanation of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory. Some Muslims, mainly Saudi Arabians, delivered the greatest humiliation to a superpower since David slew Goliath. They outsmarted all 17 US intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, the Saudia Arabians who humiliated Ameria were involved in a conspiracy to do so.

Is it a believable conspiracy?

The ability of a few young Muslim men to pull off such a feat is unbelievable. Such total failure of the US National Security State means that America was blindly vulnerable throughout the decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union. If such total failure of the National Security State had really occurred, the White House and Congress would have been screaming for an investigation. People would have been held accountable for the long chain of security failures that allowed the plot to succeed. Instead, no one was even reprimanded, and the White House resisted all efforts for an investigation for a year. Finally, to shut up the 9/11 families, a 9/11 Commission was convened. The commission duly wrote down the government’s story and that was the “investigation.”

Moreover, there is no evidence to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Indeed, all known evidence contradicts the official conspiracy theory.

For example, it is a proven fact that Building 7 came down at freefall acceleration, which means it was wired for demolition. Why was it wired for demolition? There is no official answer to this question.

It is the known evidence provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who were in the twin towers and personally experienced the numerous explosions that brough down the towers that is described as a conspiracy theory.

Since the first peer-reviewed journal paper that critically examined the evidence of the events of September 11th, 2001, which was by physics professor Steven E. Jones entitled “What Accounts for the Molten Metal Observed on 9/11/2001?” in the Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in 2006, there have been several academics that worked very hard over the years to publish in mainstream journals despite the barriers. This is a major achievement for the 9/11 research community.

Despite tough talk, Trump approach on Afghanistan is no different than 2009.

By Mark Perry
August 22, 2017
The American Conservative

President Donald Trump walks with U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Howard, commander of Joint Force Headquarters, at Arlington National Cemetery, May 29, 2017. Behind them are Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Flickr/CreativeCommons/DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)

The American people don’t like long wars with uncertain outcomes—and never have. That was true in 1953, when the U.S. accepted a stalemate and armistice with the Chinese-backed North Koreans, and it was true again in 1975, when the U.S. suffered an ignominious defeat and 58,000 dead at the hands of pajama-clad guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army. “Never fight a land war in Asia,” General Douglas MacArthur famously said, and for good reason: in both Korea and Vietnam, the enemy could be endlessly supplied and reinforced.

The solution, in both cases, was to either widen the war or leave. In Korea, MacArthur proposed expanding the war by taking on Chinese military sanctuaries in China (which got him fired), while in Vietnam, Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and mined North Vietnam’s harbors, an expansion of the war that sparked a genocide and merely postponed the inevitable. America’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have been as unsatisfying. A troop surge retrieved America’s position in Iraq, though most military officers now view Baghdad as “a suburb of Tehran” (as a currently serving Army officer phrased it), while the U.S. has spent over $800 billion on a Kabul government whose writ extends to sixty percent of the country—or less.

Given this, it’s not surprising that opinion surveys showed that the majority of the U.S. military supported Donald Trump in the last election; Trump promised a rethink of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan’s adventures, while Clinton was derided as an interventionist, or in Pentagon parlance, “cruise missile liberal.” Trump had the edge over his opponent among both military voters and veterans, especially when it came to ISIS: “I would bomb the shit out of them” he said, a statement translated in the military community as “I would bomb the shit out of them—and get out.” A headline in The Military Times two months before the election said it all: “After 15 years of war, America’s military has about had it with ‘nation building.’”

As it turned out, the military weren’t the only ones who’d “had it with nation building”—so too did Donald Trump. Back in January 2013, two years before he was a candidate for president, Trump made it clear what he would do if he ever occupied the White House. “Let’s get out of Afghanistan,” he tweeted. “Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Three days later, Trump was even more outspoken, explicitly endorsing Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy—which amounted to a troops surge, followed by a troop drawdown. “I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan,” he wrote. “We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money – rebuild the U.S.!”

When Trump was elected I wrote that it was unlikely that he would be successful in accomplishing the three objectives for which he was elected—peace with Russia, the return home of offshored US jobs, and effective limits on non-white immigration—because these objectives conflicted with the interests of those more powerful than the president.

I wrote that Trump was unfamiliar with Washington and would fail to appoint a government that would support his goals. I wrote that unless the ruling oligarchy could bring Trump under its control,Trump would be assassinated.

Trump has been brought under control by assassinating him with words rather than with a bullet. With Steve Bannon’s dismissal, there is now no one in Trump’s government who supports him. He is surrounded by Russophobic generals and Zionists.

But this is not enough for the liberal/progressive/left. They want Trump impeached and driven from office.

Marjorie Cohn, whom I have always admired for her defense of civil liberty, has disappointed me. She has written in Truthout, which sadly has become more like PropagandaOut, that the House must bring articles of impeachment against Trump for his abuse of power and before he launches a new civil war and/or nuclear war.

This is an extraordinary conclusion for a normally intelligent person to reach. What power does Trump have? How does he abuse his non-existent power? The ruling Establishment has cut his balls off. He is neutered. Powerless. He has been completely isolated within his own government by the oligarchy.

Even more astonishingly, Marjorie Cohn, together with 100% of the liberal/progressive/left are blind to the fact that they have helped the military/security complex destroy the only leader who advocated peace instead of conflict with the other major nuclear power. Cohn is so deranged by hatred of Trump that she thinks it is Trump who will bring nuclear war by normalizing relations with Russia.